The Wolfpacker: An Independent Magazine Covering NC State Sports
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1525890
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2024 ■ 45 about no darn speed bumps; I'm not go- ing to keep letting them slow me down." I said to myself, "You know what? I'm going to play for this crazy coach." That was just the type of person Coach Sloan was. He wasn't going to let anything slow him down. We had a pretty good team during my first year. We had a great player named Charles "Hawkeye" Whitney, who was from the D.C. area and had also played at DeMatha, so it made everything more comfortable for us all. The funny thing about Whitney was that he was assigned to be our host when we first visited NC State. But just min- utes after meeting him for the tour, Sid- ney Lowe and I remember him turning to us and saying, "Listen guys, y'all just hang out here; I'll be right back," and he just disappeared on us. We only saw him again the following year when we became teammates. But Hawkeye was a cool guy and a fierce competitor and was the leading scorer on our team that season. Hawkeye was a big, powerful guy who was 6'5, weighed about 245 pounds, and was my workout partner in the weight room. I will never forget the time he went up for a dunk against Georgia Tech, and one of the opposing players under- cut him, causing Hawkeye to fall on his head, and he came up bleeding. Hawk- eye came back up and started to rush toward the player who had fouled him, and my instinct was to grab Hawkeye and hold onto him until the rest of the team came over and helped me stop him. Hawkeye kept saying, "Let me go, I'm going to kill this guy, let me go." Now, I wanted to hold onto him be- cause I knew he would try to kill the Georgia Tech player, but also because we were winning the game, and if I had let him go, we would probably have lost. We ended up winning the game, and while we were in the locker room, Hawkeye came over to me and said, "Listen, you little jerk, don't you ever grab me like that ever again or I'm going to kill you." Everyone on the team was shocked that I had been able to hold him back from fighting. But the crazy thing was that when Hawkeye and I worked out together, he never changed the weights. He made me lift the same weight as him, eventually making me a stronger player. But there were no hard feelings between us. We just made a joke out of it and moved on. We finished the season with an overall record of 20-8 and tied for second place in the ACC. In the ACC Tournament, we played Duke and lost in the first round. But our goal all year was to get to the NCAA Tournament and try to win the National Championship. Although Sid- ney Lowe, Thurl Bailey, and I were only freshmen, we had a good chance at com- peting against any team in the tourna- ment. After being selected to play in the NCAA Tournament, we played against Iowa in the East Region in Greensboro, less than an hour from our campus. If we beat Iowa, we would have needed to win three more games to have a great chance of making it into the Final Four. I remember we had been out there on the court doing our first warm-up and then headed back to the locker room. We were all in good spirits and felt we would beat Iowa. Unfortunately, once we had gotten back to the locker, Hawk- eye Whitney came rushing in and an- nounced to all of us that he had heard Coach Sloan would be leaving NC State and taking the job at the University of Whittenburg idolized his cousin David Thompson and eventually followed the legendary player to NC State. In 1983, Whittenburg helped lead the Pack to a national championship. PHOTO COURTESY NC STATE ATHLETICS